I, uh, don't think this is what the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators envisioned in the final weekend of the regular season.
Both teams playing out the string, and have been for a fair bit of time. And, on both sides, things are a bit messy right now.
Toronto's percentage-fueled run finally and, not surprisingly, crashed back to Planet Earth, and now all that's left is the seemingly-inevitably firing of Randy Carlyle. Rumors are already surfacing that the team's primary target is New Jersey Devils head coach Peter DeBoer. To me, just swapping Carlyle and DeBoer alone could bring Toronto back to the post-season in 2014 -- only this time, legitimately.
I've thought a lot about where it all went wrong for the Maple Leafs, and everything in the data suggests to me that a talented roster is getting absolutely sandbagged by, for my money, one of the worst coaches (and a collection of some of the dumbest assistant coaches) in the game today. If Toronto can preserve the talent they have on the roster next year and bring the team back into possession-respectability -- I estimate that, considering Toronto's true-talent team-level shooting and save percentages (likely a hair or two above the league averages), they likely only need to carry 48-49% of the play -- they'll be just fine.
On the other side, you've got an Ottawa team that, really, is far more of a mystery to me. It's easy to look at the Toronto Maple Leafs and explain why they missed the post-season. It's not so easy to look at the Ottawa Senators and do the same.
It's not that Ottawa was unlucky this year -- they never really had the look of a playoff-caliber club at any point in this season. Their numbers have wildly tailed off from last year's group, which was truly a talented lot. It's just hard to figure out the how and why this slide occurred. I've written, to some depth, about some of the statistical oddities with this team, and all year, we've spent investigating why a team that looks so brilliant ni the offensive zone looks so excruciatingly bad in the defensive third.
I think it's fair to say that Ottawa's problems are (a) talent-related; (b) predominantly in the defensive zone; and (c) are doing just enough to curb a productive forward group. It's frustrating, and I'm not sure there's an easy answer other than 'this team really, really needs another defenseman to go along with Erik Karlsson'.
So, one team that really needs a coaching overhaul is almost certainly going to get one. Ottawa, almost certainly, needs to address the defense through the free agency market or via trade. The only problem, as always, is that the league doesn't operate on Monopoly money, and there's no way of knowing whether Ottawa will be able to find enough nickels in the couch cushions to take care of the problem areas.
The good: both teams, to my eye anyway, are very fixable. The bad: one organization's executives and coaching staff were in denial for two years straight, and the other is probably getting prepared for three/four months of crying poor, and looking for dumpster-dive options like Joe Corvo to remediate the back-end issues.
Either way, it's going to be an interesting summer for both sides.
Now, for the meaningless end-of-year game ...
Thanks for reading!